Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority by Nicholas Watson (review)

REVIEWS we might instead argue the Tale's proximity, that it courts the illusion of exemplum, not quite comparable to any one actual sermon exemplum, to be sure, but a rhetorically elaborated, and paradoxically therefore a quin­ tessential, facsimile of the genre.Indeed, the sheer sensationalism of the Tale, an aspect that Volk-Birke neglects and that may leave a more lasting impression on the mind, bears close comparison to the violent and sordid resonance of certain of the exempla ofJohn Mirk's Festial. Finally, before a two-page conclusion that recapitulates hermain ideas, chapter 13 considers the sermon affinities of The Nun's Priest's Tale. Well might this chapter be headed "Preaching Transformed." Distinct, formal resemblances in this Tale to medieval sermons are nevertheless fitful, and on balance we are left thinking how little like medieval preaching it is. In sum, I can imaginea worse vade mecum than this book, but unfortu­ nately I can also imagine a better. A search through Chaucer andMedieval Preaching may well uncover the occasional florin, but not before we have also turned up many a crooked way. ALAN]. FLETCHER University College, Dublin NICHOLAS WATSON. Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, vol. 13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.Pp.xiv, 358.$90.0 0. Rolle's standing has been far lower in the second half ofthis century than it was in the first, and Nicholas Watson concludes this judicious study of Rolle, whom he considers a major Latin author, with the sobering observa­ tion that Rolle's popularity "has...past all recovery gone" (p. 269). Wat­ son's distaste is frequently only lightly masked in this study, yet his as­ tringent reading of Rolle's works is to be welcomed: a new generation of scholars who maintain a skeptical religious stance is now subjecting my­ stical writing to the scrutiny of modern critical theory. Building on much recent work on Rolle that has returned our attention to the text itself, through codicology, textual criticism, manuscript ownership, and the identification of some of Rolle's sources, Watson pro­ poses a reordering and redating ofRolle's writings.He suggests that most of Rolle's oeuvre was produced in the two decades before his death in 1349 289 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and that he was probably born between 1305 and 1310 rather than 12901300 , as Horstman and Allen assumed (p. 278); in other words, Rolle was "probably nearer forty than fifty when he died." This partly resolves the term iuvenis which Rolle uses of himself in many of his Latin works. It was the presence of this term, and the experimental style, which led Hope Allen to assume that Melos amoris was an early work. Watson argues convincingly that Melos forms a culmination ro Rolle's middle, apologetic, phase and forms a transition to his later, audience-directed works in Latin and English. Watson evaluates Rolle's writing as an apprenticeship in an authorial style that proclaims by its very hypertextuality the divine authenticity of its content. Central to this process is the establishment of the ambivalent model of hermit preacher that Rolle sets up as the "I" within the text. This is the subject that Watson finds so fascinatingly audacious in its self­ reflexivity. He claims that Rolle's writing has a hidden agenda: when uncovered, in Incendium amon's, this agenda proves to be the "canoniza­ tion" of the writer as a modern auctor and modern master of the spiritual life (p. 196). Watson reads much of Rolle's work as "apologetic" in stance and so identifies the textual "I" with the author; another reading might treat it as a persona. Watson does, however, challenge earlier readings of Rolle's work as corroboration of the dramatic conversion recounted in the Officium et miracula SanctiRicardi, probably compiled in the 1380s as a prelude to a never-initiated process for Rolle's canonization. Watson rightly classifies the Officium as hagiography, presenting Rolle as a fourteenth-century St. Francis, who left family and clothing in the fervor of religious conversion (pp. 40-42, 224, 295-96). In Watson's opinion, Rolle presented himselfas the hermit- saint communing directly...